1970
DIARY OF AN AMERICAN MILITARY ADVISOR TO THE INDIAN FORCES, FOUND BY CHINESE INFANTRY ON A BODY IN KASHMIR
How does the world look now?
They never did get the bomb working... something to do with the Strong Nuclear Force... I never was much of a scientist.
The legacy of the Japanese War was like a ton of bricks on the American Psyche. The suicide attacks continued up to the day we left the place. The few we got alive, and got talking, surprised us all. They were not loyal to Hirohito, or to any heir. They were not especially communist, either. They simply wanted us to leave. Once we did, the same types of people ended up on both sides of the new conflict - The South East Asian Civil Wars.
Vietnam, Korea, Japan, China. The entire region was riven by conflict between communists backed by the Soviets, and democrats backed up by the Western Allies. The world was becoming polarised - in every country Communist Parties were gaining in numbers while in the Communist countries dissent was ruthlessly crushed.
We watched China fall to the Communists. In Japan the Soviets had seen what happened to us and would not directly invade. Japan ended up a mixed government much to the surprise of everyone. Korea was partitioned - the North Communist and the South 'Free'. By the time it came round to Vietnam the America public had seen enough war. The draft was rejected by over 3/4 of the population. No Army meant No War. And so we watched Vietnam fall to the Communists despite every arms shipment we could spare.
Tensions continued to rise between the Soviets and the West. We formed NATO, re-armed the West Germans, co-opted in the Spanish and Portugese, persuaded the Swedes and Finns into it.
The Soviets formed the Warsaw Pact and invited every guerilla movement in the world to 'sign here for free guns'. Many did. In Europe, groups like the IRA and the RAF, divided by politics but united in common enemies, joined logistical forces and attacked each-others targets across Europe.
African rebels, desperate for freedom, took the Soviet shilling, took their guns and advisors, and turned on the white farmers and their rival tribes. The clans that the Soviets saw potential in were favoured with tanks - manned by Soviet troops of course. The designated victims were told 'fall in or die'. Western Colonial regimes found themselves under attack from insurgent forces which the Soviets barely bothered to disguise their links to.
The West found few friends in Africa outside the white settlers in the South, now a heavily armed enclave that received more refugees daily. There was talk of expelling the black population from the area they controlled - South Africa, Rhodesia, parts of Namibia and Botswana.
In Latin America, similar things were occuring. American forces backed up rulers of questionable mandate and kept an uneasy peace. A popular uprising in Cuba was quelled at the cost of a permanent American garrison, but by and large South America remained part of the 'West'.